The Allostatic Spiral
Earthrise, hailed as the greatest environmental photograph of all time, and one of the more famous photographs of the era, was shot from lunar orbit on the Apollo 8 mission on Christmas Eve, 1968. The image of the small blue marble rising above the cold lunar landscape and hanging in the void of space, brought us face to face with our own finitude and inspired a whole ecological movement. The dumb empty space of the cosmos became existential in an instant, a giant void to highlight the absurdity of our existence upon the mortal earth.
We might credit the astronauts with a certain amount of originality except that the image had already appeared earlier that year at the cineplex, in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odessey, scored by the thundering drums of Sunrise, from Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896). In the sequence, the sun rises beyond the earth that rises likewise beyond the foregrounded moon, making what amounts to an image that, though impossible astronomically speaking, evokes all of the beautiful and ridiculous finitude of our local gravitational well as it falls through the cosmos. Of the sublime in cinema, this is one of the pinnacles.
But the brutal vastness of space, and the absurd sublimity of both image and film, would soon collapse into conspiracy. The moon landing, taking place the next year in the summer of ‘69, and broadcasted live on national television would become an example of the Baudrillardian simulation par excellence: a selection of the populace just didn’t believe it and still don’t. The Flat Earth Society, treating NASA as enemy number one, declared that, not only had all Apollo missions been faked, but that the moon landing itself had been filmed and directed, in a secret NASA soundstage, by none other than Stanley Kubrick. The Shining (1980), so the theory goes, is Kubrick’s cryptic confession to directing the moon hoax, in which the cursed hotel room 237 is the big clue—because the moon is 237,000 miles away, I guess. Meanwhile, in real life, Kubrick had had dealings with NASA because he had shot the just absolutely gorgeous naturally lit Barry Lyndon (1975) on special light-sensitive camera lenses that NASA had designed for photographing the dark side of the moon.
A less conspiratorial conspiracy playing out on the internet today is whether or not Kubrick dropped acid. For some 2001 is the acid movie. After Pauline Kael panned the movie in Harper’s, the studio, revamping the ad campaign towards the nascent counter-culture, billed the movie as “the ultimate trip.” Subsequently many felt the need to watch the movie on acid. Surely its creator had gone there also? Michael Pollen has claimed that Kubrick underwent LSD therapy when it was the rage in Hollywood in the fifties and sixties, back when acid was legal, had no stigma and pretty much everyone was doing it under the auspices of psychiatry. But Kubrick himself remained equivocal and denied use:
I have to say that it (2001) was never meant to represent an acid trip. On the other hand a connection does exist. An acid trip is probably similar to the kind of mind-boggling experience that might occur at the moment of encountering extraterrestrial intelligence. I’ve been put off experimenting with LSD because I don’t like what seems to happen to people who try it.
We may speculate that what seems to happen to certain people on acid is that following their encounter with the alien (who is their own self) they cannot merely return to just being themselves. Perhaps Kubrick, as the supreme auteur, was afraid of this loss of control?
If your habitual experience is a stream of consciousness, as the psychologist liked to say, a river into which you cannot step twice, then acid makes this stream a cataract, and, once you return to a normal volume of flow, you may find yourself considerably down river (note). While acid is technically non-addictive, there are, nevertheless, certain rare persons who are addicted to acid. In my view they are addicted not to the substance, but to the experience; they are addicted precisely to the cataract, to overwhelm. The specific name for this in literature is the allostatic spiral.
This is the spiraling arc of 2001. Once astronaut Dave Bowman unplugs HAL9000, the malignant and infallible AI pilot of the spaceship (as if, per the death of god from Zarathustra, he were unplugging god) he proceeds into the abyss of space, following the alien monolith and passing beyond the limit, proceeds into the long chaotic “star gate” scene that has famously overwhelmed audiences (it overwhelmed me when I saw it at the Film Forum in 2018). Psychic space is transposed upon existential space; the blackness of space flashes to vibrant color; where once Dave had been journeying outwards, now he journeys within. The infinite chasm of the galaxy becomes the projected space of his own dreamscape—from which, finally, he cannot return.
This particular narrative arc, the arc of no return, has appeared for a long time in the guise of tragedy, but more recently has found a number of quintessentially modern variations, perhaps most thoroughly embodied by works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Moby-Dick (1851). Alien (1978), is basically Moby-Dick in space, where the white whale becomes the superweapon xenomorph. But the arc of no return does not just mean that everyone dies, although it can mean that, but is rather a transformation through trauma—even a kind of traumatophilia…
For some reason (thinky face emoji) the year of our lord 2018 was a bumper year for just this kind of narrative arc. Aniara, a Swedish sci-fi film, based on a 1956 poem of the same name, lead the charge in its bleak outlook and expresses the arc of no return in the most literal of terms. A cosmic cruise ship, ferrying passengers from a destroyed earth to a recently colonized Mars, malfunctions and, its course permanently altered, journeys indefinitely without destination into emptiness of the cosmos; existential panic ensues, weird sex cults are formed; spoiler alert: they will not be rescued. Likewise released that year was Clair Denis’s very good High Life, starring Juliet Binoche, Robert Pattinson and Andre 3000, a similar story regarding a spaceship full of juvenile delinquents sent, as an experiment, to fly into a black hole. There was also Annihilation, starring Natalie Portman, a not-that-great adaptation of the excellent Jeff Vandemeer novel, following a group of scientists as they pass beyond the known world in the exploration of the mysterious Area X. And lastly Gaspar Noe’s Climax, the story of a dance troupe, convening at an abandoned high-school, and where the punch has been spiked, of course, with acid—madness and terror ensue. These movies are not for everyone, just FYI.
The basic feature of this arc—that the main character, or characters, do not return to normal—may be contrasted by its opposite and far more common narrative type, which is, you guessed it, a complete return to normal. Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan’s homage to 2001, betrays its own stunted imagination by allowing Matthew McConaughey, even after falling into a black hole, a complete return to the cocky authority of Matthew McConaughey. Unlike Dave in 2001, who suffers radical break-down and total transformation, Matthew McConaughey is allowed to go on being exactly himself. The Martian (2015) staring Matt Damon, is this same old story: after a harrowing journey of survival in the harsh Martian surround, plucky Matt Damon returns to the green earth and drinks a coffee. The viewer is comforted to know that, though Mars may be hell, Matt Damon, and Starbucks, go on forever.
These are complacent movies for a complacent age; but really, it’s an old plot and we can find its like everywhere from Homer’s Odyssey, to Robinson Crusoe, to Wizard of Oz. It is no wonder that Nolan’s upcoming release is an adaptation of The Odyssey, starring, you guessed it, the everyman Matt Damon. Following Francis Fukayam’s 1999 thesis that, with the advent of global capitalism, history has finally come to an end and we can just go on consuming Gatorade and Doritos without fear of cataclysm, we will call this all-too-common plot type—embodied by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and nearly every sitcom—the arc of the same.
To reiterate: In the arc of no return, the ship has no pilot, or, like HAL9000, or Captain Ahab, the pilot is inimical; in the arc of the same the pilot is Matthew McConaughey. This clues us into a basic historical feature of the arc of no return, and what seperates it finally from tragedy: it is a plot type that arrives following upon the death of god. Existential angst, going off the charts in the post-war era, is an acute expression of helplessness, that most fundamental of human emotions. This, I think, is the primordial feeling state those astronauts are registering when they view the earth from a tin can hanging in the void. That the arc of no return figures so highly in the year 2018, midway through the first Trump administration, is an expression of this same helplessness, together with a good dose of overwhelm. The internet is acid and the entire culture is in an allostatic spiral. Where we once could trust that god or king, or our parents could save us, could steer the ship clear of danger, now we are beginning to realize that no one is steering.
This is probably what the flat-earth conspiracist (and religious person) cannot finally accept and so must disavow; there must be someone in charge! Who cares if they are malevolent! The infinite void of space is just a government soundstage, directed by Stanley Kubrick.
